Gucci'sUrban Garden
Fashion alchemist Alessandro Michele brings his whimsical take on luxury to the fragrance counter (and Times Square), with help from Dakota Johnson, Hari Nef and Petra Collins. By Belinda McKeon
Alessandro Michele is a magpie. Witness his Instagram feed, which regularly features object tableaux from his home in Rome; he voraciously
gathers the artifacts of other centuries, be they Renaissance altar frontals or 1960s Adidas kicks. He paints a picture of himself that any collector will recognise: Sitting in bed late at night, buying piece after piece, click after click, unable to stop, but seeing his f inds as rescues. “Because otherwise they’re thrown away or forgotten; they don’t know how they are precious.”
This creates a certain aura. “My boyfriend always says, ‘Oh, there is a really strong smell of old in here,’” Michele says with a laugh. “I always say, ‘You can really smell the dead and the things that have happened, and now what is happening.’ ”
Hence, Michele’s new fragrance, Gucci Bloom, his f irst for the brand since being named Creative Director in 2015: “After two years,” he says, “I was able to give [Gucci] a smell.” Perfumer Alberto Morillas says that Michele’s directive to him was that Bloom be “feminine and happy.” Their collaboration “wasn’t very complicated,” Morillas adds. “Alessandro understands everything about perfume, and he’s charming and creative.” The result is a scent blended with tuberose, jasmine and musk (“my secret musk,” jokes Morillas), with a whisper of the evocatively named Rangoon creeper, that calls to mind summer grasses and morning sunshine, but with something sharper, less languid, pulsing nearby. It smells both modern and traditional—which was exactly as Michele wished. “You recognise the f lowers,” says Morillas, “but because of how they were extracted, what could have seemed old-fashioned, is totally different.” “I was thinking,” Michele says, “what happened if a young girl goes in the garden of her old aunt, and there are f lowers but also vegetables, in the middle of a city.”
Which is how a garden grew over a Times Square subway grate one morning in May; around which Hari Nef, Petra Collins and Dakota Johnson, the faces of the fragrance, lazed with Michele. “I don’t like to use the word ‘whimsical,’” Johnson says of Bloom, “but it feels whimsical. Something very sweet and mysterious.” According to Nef, the scent possesses “something ancient in a cool, sinister way. But the f lorals ground it in this prettiness.” Collins says she’s never worn scent before this one. “I’ve always just been my body odour,” she explains. “But this is like a layer of emotion that you put on. Because I feel like ever y other perfume has always been sold just as sex.”
Michele’s reign at Gucci has been revolutionar y. The sleek soft porn of the Tom Ford years is a distant memory—that capital “G” shaved into model Louise Pedersen’s pubic hair has long since grown out—but so too is the clean-lined, WASPmannered vision of Frida Giannini, who was Creative Director from 2006 until her ouster in early 2015. Michele has unleashed a f lea market of the imagination onto the brand’s identity, burying the sharp suits and leather miniskirts beneath a cascade of vintage, antique and art-historical references and embellishments. His looks are frequently androgynous, even more frequently downright odd, and in love with marrying disparate references, textures and materials.
Michele grew up in Rome, where his mother worked as an executive assistant at a f ilm studio, while his father, a much earthier f igure (he was atechnician, but wrote and sculpted in his time off, carving wooden walking sticks, among other things), taught the young Alessandro to have a kinship with nature. This melding of high style and quasi-shamanism informed Michele’s own approach as a creator, from his university studies in costume design to his early days designing handbags at Fendi, but his appointment to the top job at Gucci nevertheless sent shock waves through the fashion world. But while the word “unknown” was used in press reports, it was hardly as if Michele, then 42, had been found in a bus station; he was the head of leather goods and shoes at Gucci, had been with the company for a dozen years, and knew the industry intimately.
And yet there is undeniably a fairy-tale element to the story of his rise, and to the whole Michele phenomenon. Though he expresses himself like an artist and not as a brand strategist, a prowess for the latter must surely lie beneath the crushed velvet and lion’s-head rings. Gucci’s f irst-quarter global sales this year jumped by more than 50 percent, contributing heavily to approximately US$3.9 billion in revenue for its parent company, Kering. Still, when Michele talks about designing, he talks about “playing,” and he actively resists tenets sacred to the fashion world—from presenting separate men’s and women’s collections to the fashion calendar itself. His fall 2017 show merged both, and he considers the idea of a seasonal collection almost disposable. “Fashion now is like an old lady that is dying,” Michele says of these changes, which he sees as vital for the industry. “I think we can let this old lady die. Fashion has done a lot of wrong things. I started when I was very young, in the ’90s, and it was one of the very attractive moments, but I think they tried to stay in this bubble—that fashion was just fashion, we are fashion, and this is not fashion, and we have to do the catwalk, and we have to do a season of things and products. I don’t think it’s working anymore.”
Nor does Michele seem bothered if these new freedoms— and the eclecticism of his pieces—send people to the Gucci racks or toward their own versions of those designs. It’s quite radical, his belief that what might otherwise be considered theft or plagiarism—the ubiquitous f loral bomber jackets this summer, the rebirth of brocade, the embellished sneakers for miles—is actually a mark of success. “I like it when I see people dressed on the street and it looks like Gucci, but it’s not,” he says. “It means you are doing something right.” “If you want to go in the store,” he adds, “that’s f ine. If you want to go to the market, it’s much better. Or if you want to buy just a pair of shoes, then you want to go to the market, it’s better than better. I do the same. It’s like, if someone wants to force you to do something, you will probably not do it.”
There is something heartening in how he has convinced a world of poise and polish to see the mismatched as beautiful, and nostalgia as a prompt for reframing and reinvention. His colleagues at Gucci say he has brought a more open atmosphere to the company, and Michele comes across like a guy who is allowed, at the very highest level, to do what he loves. “It’s more that my job is my life,” he replies when I ask him about how he resists pressure. “I feel happy when I work. I don’t care if I will be f ired tomorrow. If you are more connected with your position than your creativity, you probably feel pressure. But if you don’t care…”
Michele doesn’t f inish his thought, but the implication is clear. “I feel like a happy person,” he says instead. “I don’t feel myself on another level. I feel lucky that I can express myself.”